


The Things You Do On LSD Are Not As Bad As The Things You Do In War

by b00mgh



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: LSD, M/M, Mission Fic, Unintentional Bonding, i almost put a furry joke in here but i didn't, if you can call this a mission, keith cries, lance tries to kill everyone, the bonding moment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-10 20:35:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15957029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/b00mgh/pseuds/b00mgh
Summary: Lance and Keith's job is easy: they are backup, should backup be necessary. However, when was the last time something went conveniently for these two?





	The Things You Do On LSD Are Not As Bad As The Things You Do In War

Three quintants with just the two of them shouldn’t be too bad– they’ve matured past meaningless squabbles, mostly. 

Pidge is with Matt, and their job is infiltration of the base. Shiro, Allura, and Hunk are the main attack and defense squad, and Coran keeps home base secure. Lance and Keith are the contingency plan– if something goes wrong, they are to go support whoever needs it, and if nobody needs support then they just lie low on this uninhabited planet (unless you count the microorganisms and fishes that may one quintant evolve into intelligent life). No less than a quintant, no more than three. If it takes more than three quintants, something is wrong and Lance and Keith should take Red to check on the attack/defense squad. 

So, just chill for three quintants, tops, with a guy who is sometimes fine and sometimes grates your nerves like the waiter at Olive Garden. Hopefully, things will be in the former case, and everything will be fine. 

“You’re eating too many of those,” Keith mutters sharply. “They’re the only food supply we have.” 

“And we have, like twenty of them,” Lance replies smoothly. With a joke on his tongue, he adds “What, am I getting fat?”

Keith doesn’t tell him that he doesn’t care, and he doesn’t tell him that he’s fucking hot either way– both thoughts are just short of mortifyingly embarrassing. He huffs to hide the color coming to his face, scoffs “do whatever you want,” and then– to have an excuse to get away from Lance and the thoughts he brings about– “I’m going to see if there’s anything else edible on this planet. In case you eat it all.” And he stalks away like he meant it. 

Lance doesn’t call after him, doesn’t offer to go with him to chase off the silence– both actions are just short of mortifyingly embarrassing. He leans back and finishes the protein pouch on the sunny side of Red’s left paw as the sun climbs into the sky, nearing the constant marker of the moon. 

 

Keith is gone for three hours, and Lance thinks little of it because he hardly notices the time pass. He’s almost napping, actually, and someone should scold him for that, but nobody gets a chance because he never actually falls asleep. That and because Keith screams like an animal from somewhere inside a forest-like tangle of webbed trees. Whether that was a spider on his shoulder or something worse, Lance wouldn’t be much of a partner if he didn’t go check it out– and even panic a little. 

He’s dodging the dense mesh of tree and tearing through an undergrowth of it for nearly a quarter of a mile before he finds Keith, face blushing red and purple like a bruise, eyes dull and unfocused, bayard held out in a sword like he’s under attack. 

“What’s going on?” Lance cries, pulling out his bayard to defend against some adversary he has yet to see. Keith doesn’t even register Lance’s presence. He’s breathing hard, heart pounding, ears singing, vision clouded and red. Lance keeps asking him what’s going on, is he okay, Keith, buddy, talk to me– and then Keith’s vision goes from red to blue. 

Lance, of course, is perfectly confused, and it only gets worse when Keith drops his bayard without deactivating it and begins to cry big, dripping, silent tears. Lance backs up and pulls Keith over his shoulder with one arm, still clutching his bayard in the other. He doesn’t know what did this to Keith, and he is not waiting around to find out. 

Walking back to the Red Lion with a sobbing Keith and two bayards in hand is long, slow, and fucking difficult. Keith won’t stop crying, telling Lance he doesn’t know– and Lance keeps asking what it is that he doesn’t know, and then Keith says he doesn’t know. There are no marks on Keith, no evidence of battle, hardly even traces of the silvery dirt that acts as topsoil on this planet marking his skin or suit. What happened to him is a mystery. But he’s a mess, clinging to Lance like an infant to its mother and crying and telling him he doesn’t know and that he’s sorry and that the sky is too big and that he’s cold. 

So here the pair sits, Keith is essentially just sitting in Lance’s lap, huddled up and shivering. Night doesn’t come like an absence of the sun on this planet, it comes when the constant moon blocks out the ambulatory sun, and only on the one side of the planet. On the other side, there is one constant sun and the ambulatory one sometimes stumbles in front of it, causing solar radiation intense enough to melt steel. However, nights, when they come to this one side of the planet, are chilly, just enough so to be uncomfortable and maybe even dangerous. Lance’s knee bounces in the spot where it isn’t pinned by Keith’s weight to try and generate some heat through movement. 

“You doing okay, Keith?” Lance asks, mostly talking to himself because the one thing he can’t stand is the silence. “You’re not dying or anything?”

Keith doesn’t even seem to know who he is– even curled up in Lance’s lap– except maybe he does, because he suddenly lurches for either side of his face, nails scraping away the skin under Lance’s jaw, and looks him right in the eyes through his melting tears and tells him “Lance, I don’t want to die.” He’s telling him, explaining, begging him, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.”   
This all but scares the everloving shit out of Lance, who instinctively holds Keith a little closer. “You’re not going to die,” he promises, “you're okay, you’re not going to die.” He holds him as close as he can get. Keith so scared that it terrifies Lance, he’s so certain. At some point, Lance is saying it for himself as much as Keith. 

They stay like that for some time– Keith shivering in Lance’s arms and Lance promising him that he would live– and somewhere in the time that it takes for night to pass Lance’s vision clouds over with red. His ears begin to sing. His heart pounds harder and harder until Keith swears it is the heartbeat of the whole world. His breathing becomes labored and fast. 

In this world, nothing is safe. In this world, you must be scared. In this world, you must protect that which you care for, or it will be killed and raked through the mud and you will be next. Fear is all that exists in this world, and Lance feels it overtake his whole body until every movement is calculated for it, his bayard stays poised for a lethal shot in his hand, and Keith stays trembling and ensconced in his arms. Nothing moves except the one sun, ambling through the sky at what seems, to the boys, to be a breakneck pace. 

Neither of them moves for another seventeen varga. 

This is, of course, entirely unknown to the rest of the team, who are off succeeding in their own areas and regrouping and heading back to the uninhabited planet to debrief and plan the next mission.

Pidge is the first one to notice that something is off– she’s recently installed an apparatus in her lion to analyze the atmospheric composition of new planets to make sure they’re breathable. “Looks like we won’t need helmets,” she says over the coms, “plenty of oxygen down there. Nothing toxic.” 

“What’s that, then?” Matt asks, pointing to one of the compounds that lays thickly– if you count 2% as thickly (which it is, for atmospheric concentrations of things)– in the air. 

Pidge squints, shifts her glasses so that the out-of-date prescription lets her see exactly what that is, and reads off “C20-H25-N3-O.”

“Pidge, I think you read that wrong,” Shiro insists from his end. 

“Nope. Matt would have told me,” Pidge replies, and Matt nods.

“Why, what’s that?” Hunk asks– and there’s only a little anxiety in his voice. 

Shiro coughs awkwardly, mutters “LSD” so fast everyone thinks they’ve misheard him.

Everyone except Allura and Coran. The former asks “What’s L-S-D?”

“A stupid strong hallucinogenic drug,” Matt tells her with a spreading grin. “Shiro, you still remember that class?”

“What class?” Hunk asks, and everyone hears the edge of a relieved laugh. Not toxic, just fucks with your brain.

“Tell you later,” Shiro says, “we’re landing.” 

Everyone sets down next to the Red Lion, making sure to put their helmets on, in a plain of orange fibers fine enough to be called hairs. There’s a red-purple forest of something like trees over to the left, it’s either dusk or dawn when they arrive, but there’s no way to be sure which, since the moon covers the sun just enough to be confusing. Their first thought is that it must be dawn, because Lance and Keith must be asleep, because they don’t come when they call, and they really were supposed to have taken turns on watch but nothing happened so it’s probably fine. But nobody is inside the Red Lion, Hunk says Yellow told him. He says Red told Yellow to check around the other side. 

They do, and they find Lance and Keith exactly the same way they’ve been sitting for two days: Keith shaking and surrounded by Lance, who is pointing the barrel of his bayard right into their faces. On his worst days, Lance is a sharpshooter, on his best days, he’s a crackshot, and right now he doesn’t even seem to know who’s in front of him, and so nobody moves. 

There’s a standoff of about two minutes of the whole team coming face to face with an incapacitated Keith and an irrational Lance. 

“Lance–” Hunk tries, and his finger tightens on the trigger.

“I don’t  _ know! _ ” he screams.

But Keith knows– or, at least, he knows something. He knows the word “Lance,” and he knows what the word means. Safe. Funny. Stupid. Annoying. Comfortable. Scared. Help. Home. Through his shaking that is as much from hunger as cold now, Keith lifts his head, and he doesn’t recognize everyone, but he sees the white cloud of Shiro’s hair and remembers his big brother and fights every panicked urge in his body just enough to put both hands on Lance’s face and tear those dazed eyes from the people he doesn’t recognize. Keith’s crying again with the strain of it, and the horrible and unreasonable fear. 

To be fair, Lance doesn’t know exactly who Keith is right now any more than he knows who Hunk is– you wouldn’t either if you were on this much LSD– the only reason Keith knows which way is up in an even general sense is because he is half galra, and that means a faster metabolism to work against the drugs. What Lance does understand is that anyone sitting as close to him as this person whom he doesn’t recognize as Keith is is not an enemy– because otherwise, he’d be dead. So he lets the person whom he doesn’t recognize as Keith hold his face and steal his eyes and his bayard falls from his hands in a tremor of cold and of terror and Pidge uses that opportunity to slam her own helmet over Lance’s head, while Shiro lunges to put his on Keith. Hunk is already running into Red’s cockpit to grab the blue and red helmets for Shiro and Pidge to wear. 

This doesn’t do anything at first– well, it makes Lance go apeshit and try to kill them all, and it makes Keith curl up into a ball to shake and cry much worse than before– but it doesn’t fix the LSD issue. In fact, if Matt hadn’t thought to pick up the bayards before Lance started running at them like a madman, then there’s a high likelihood that Voltron would have quickly been short several paladins. As it were, it’s just an inebriated Lance versus the collective of Hunk, Pidge, Matt, Allura, and Coran. It doesn’t even take three of them: Hunk holds him back from behind, and when he wiggles out of his hands, Allura takes over with an iron grip. Several feet away, Shiro is trying, unsuccessfully, to coax Keith into something like consciousness.

Lance fights until he’s exhausted himself, and then collapses into the silver dirt. 

Keith goes unresponsive the moment Shiro tries to reach for him.

They carry the two of them back to the ship, and they’re sort of laughing because after fighting a war for three years, this sort of thing is almost like a practical joke. Ah-haha, remember that time Lance and Keith were on that LSD planet and Keith was crying and Lance was screaming? And they both kept trying to kill themselves for hours until the LSD wore off? That sure was funny. Or, at least, it was when you compare it to the time where we all went into that firefight knowing that we would all probably die and that our homeworld would be enslaved or eradicated after us, and we only made it out just barely and with horrible scars that would last our whole lives. 

On their temporary, floating home base, and still entirely out of their minds, Keith tries to slit his wrists with a pocket knife and Lance tries to jump out of a window into the atmosphere. Several times each. They put Lance in a room without a window and he screams himself hoarse and bangs his head against a wall. They take Keith’s knife away and he claws at himself until he’s bleeding anyway and they have to tie socks onto his hands. Nobody wants to try putting them in the same room, because what if they try to hurt each other? But it ends up happening so that they don’t have to spread themselves out all over home base while they eat, and what ends up happening is that Keith seems to vaguely recognize Lance, enough to stop sobbing, and to run himself into him not as a display of aggression but as a request for comfort, and Lance must decide that anyone who gets that close without hurting him is friendly because he stops banging his head on the wall and just sits there, more still than the stationary moon. 

Everyone else is glad for that. Coran jokes that as long as they’ve stopped hurting themselves we all might as well finish our food and debrief. 

Given his faster metabolism, Keith shakes off the haze first. His first thought is that he’s warm, and his second thought is that he’s comfortable, and his third thought is that he’s  _ in someone’s lap holy flying fuck _ . But he’s scared that  _ teleporting as far as he can get in one jump _ will spook this person, so he doesn’t do that immediately. But then he sees that he’s sitting in Lance’s lap and all that logic just drops off a fucking cliff and he’s yeeting to the other side of the room at light speed, letting an expletive or three drop as he goes. 

Of course, this rouses Lance, who had been something like half-asleep, and still half-inebriated, and his first thought is that he’s cold, and his second thought is that he’s afraid, and his third thought is nothing because there’s still enough LSD in there that he can’t get past two thoughts. Keith sees Lance, and his hysteria, recalls approximately two and a half hours of what was supposed to be their mission and is starting to piece together something similar to what may have happened, but there’s certainly some holes in his story. Namely: what the fuck happened to his arms, why is Lance bruised like an overripe banana, and why are they locked in a room together? When Lance blinks a hazy blink, stands up like he’s ready to fight, Keith figures maybe it’s better to calm him down from wherever the fuck he is first. 

But maybe the LSD isn’t entirely intoxicating anymore, because Lance recognizes Keith when he starts taking cautious steps towards him, and he tries to hold back the fight instinct, and he falls over– passed out from stress and exhaustion and the drowsiness that comes with coming down from an LSD high. 

Keith tries to knock on the one door in the room, but nobody comes. What he doesn’t know is that the rest of the team is eating and debriefing in the kitchen area of the home base, and they couldn’t hear him unless he screamed bloody murder– and he has enough composure not to. 

“Shit, fuck, Lance?” Keith is scrambling to make sure he hasn’t passed out from anything that’s going to kill him, and there’s just a rapid and decelerating heart rate and a fluttering breath when he checks, so the vitals are working and there’s nothing to worry about. 

“I don’t know,” Lance whispers, “I don’t know.” 

“That’s okay,” Keith tells him softly. 

When everyone is done eating, and the debriefing has been wrapped up, Pidge comes and unlocks the door and checks on the two of them, and Keith is leaning on a wall with Lance’s head on his thighs, running his dried-blood-covered fingers through Lance’s dried-blood-covered hair. And she asks if they’re all, like, not on drugs anymore. And Keith laughs, says is that really what happened, and then tells her he’ll get up when he doesn’t have a stupid guy sleeping on his legs. 


End file.
